Story retelling in emergent literacy

Abstract:

The purpose of this study was to explore the value of story
retelling as a wholistic and natural approach to literacy
learning in a Grade One classroom.
Brown and Cambourne (1987) developed story retelling as a
strategy to improve reading comprehension, and writing. The
strategy is implemented as follows. After being immersed in a
literary genre such as the folktale, the children share what they
know in making predictions about the text and vocabulary used in
an unfamiliar story within the genre. The children read or hear
the story several times, confirming and refining their
predictions, and then they write or dictate a paraphrasing of the
story without referring back to a copy of the text. The children
then share and compare their retellings with others and with the
original text.
I explored the potential of story retelling as a language
learning strategy through an action research project in my Grade
One classroom. The premise of action research for this project
was a commitment to improved practice through action, informed by
an increased awareness of what actually happened in the classroom
as the children were engaged in retelling.
I worked through two action research cycles of three weeks
each as modelled in The Action Research Planner (Kemmis & McTaggart, 1981). The fundamental aspects of an action research
cycle include- developing a flexible and forwarding looking plan,
acting to implement the plan, observing the effects of the
action, and reflecting upon the effects of the action as a basis
for the planning of the next cycle.
In the first cycle, my plan of action was to have the
children read, write and share in pairs of developmentally
mature/delayed readers, same gender, and mixed gender. The
children advanced to individual retellings as their expertise
grew through the first cycle and into the second cycle of the
plan. This was a modification of story retelling developed by
Brown & Cambourne in Read and Retell (1987) because the children
with whom the authors worked were considerably more mature than
the six and seven year olds in my Grade One classroom.
Through the retellings, the children demonstrated their
comprehension of the story in personal ways. I read and heard a
synthesis or re-creation of the original story with a sequencing
of events, an attention to main ideas and details, an attempt at
inferencing, and a sensitivity to style and form. Often the
child's voice was evident in the retelling as well.
In the reflective pause between the two action research
cycles I had time to consider my journal entries and I did
additional readings from the literature to inform the revised
plan. As I revised the retelling strategy in the second cycle of
the study, it became clear that children in the Grade One class
were beginning to internalize reading and writing processes. And
as they became increasingly familiar with the forms and
conventions of written communication, they were edging ever
closer to a point where they were more fully engaged in 'pulling
up from their linguistic guts all that they know about oral
language in order to understand and learn written language'
(Halliday, 1986 cited in Brown & Cambourne, 1987, p.27).
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